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Cold Souls
One certainly understands the comparison between the work of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and Cold Souls writer-director Sophie Barthes; both take heady metaphysical concepts (identity, memory) and funnel them into cheekily deadpan stories of unhappy individuals trying to find release through unusual and often fantastical means. Their characters futilely attempt to dodge life’s big questions by looking outward to the latest thing (technological, psychotropic, etc.) rather than diving into the messy realities of living.
Certainly, Paul Giamatti, playing a version of himself, has had enough of such mess. He’s trying to prepare for a New York production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, but finds himself too burdened by anxieties to really give himself over to the role. He stumbles upon an article in The New Yorker about one Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn), who offers his clients the chance to unburden themselves by literally removing and storing their souls. Giamatti is initially skeptical but, after a trip to Flintstein’s 2001-ish white-on-white office, eventually decides to undergo the process. Unencumbered by the weight of his soul, he finds himself unable to feel emotion of any depth and returns to Flintstein to have it swapped with that of a Russian poet. This helps him in Vanya, but trouble comes when he goes back to collect his own soul. It’s missing: shipped over to Russia in the body of soul-trafficking “mule” Nina (Dina Korzun) to help embolden the talents of a Russian soul trafficker’s would-be actress girlfriend. But Nina is willing to help Paul, after gaining a glimpse of the inner workings of his soul as she transported it in her body.
Fantastical route to self-fulfillment; screw-loose corporate structure surrounding said process; a dash of showbiz meta-awareness: so far, so Kaufman-esque. The difference comes in how each views a character’s process of escape. Kaufman takes clear pleasure in imagining the rough-and-tumble, at times comically banal details of his fanciful conceits: being sucked into the body of a celebrity in Being John Malkovich or gliding through the memories of a broken romance in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Emotional arcs become flamboyantly visualized physical journeys. Barthes displays a good deal of sympathy for her emotionally adrift characters but casts a cooler eye upon her own invention, which she sees in more moralistic terms: the commodification of human essence as the ultimate consumerist indulgence.
It’s a choice that limits Cold Souls’s ultimate vision, making it at once restricted and fuzzy. The soul is seen as our capacity for deeply felt human emotion and the repository of meaningful memories, but this conception feels more talked about than fleshed out. Only in moments when we glimpse the stray memories that Paul and Nina see as they carry another’s soul within them does the film acquire a kind of poignant mystery, evoking the disorienting yet oddly intimate experience of examining a stranger’s photographs or leafing through a diary found on the street. Barthes’ ultimate point—a call for honest self-reflection and empathetic awareness of others over desensitized capitalist malaise—is worthwhile. Given the unique accoutrements with which she’s dressed it, however, it also feels a little thin and more than a touch simplistic.
Rather than pondering the path to happiness, Cold Souls feels most satisfying when displaying Giamatti’s misery. Few can make irritability and dejection as vividly funny and affecting as Giamatti. The inevitable blurring of actor and role here gestures toward the film’s larger considerations of identity as both innate and subject to augmentation. Unfortunately, a "gesture” is just that, symptomatic of this clever, sporadically moving, yet underdeveloped film’s overall deficiencies. The film’s final moment crystallizes this: a sharp, clear image of two people by the ocean that gradually blurs out of focus, the reverse of a technique that Barthes sprinkles throughout the film. Like so much of Cold Souls, it intriguingly evokes a meaning that, in the end, feels only half there.
Matt Connolly
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